These things are small so it’s hard to get a good picture. The dime is for size. They like to hang out in between branches mostly. They like small plants about a foot tall. When a plant gets more than a tiny number it seems like growth is greatly inhibited and the plant will flower way too soon.
@stcapt Can you get a pic with one on the plant.
Reason I ask is to get an intact pic with the legs too just to get a better idea of what they are for sure.
They look a lot like a white tick, but for plants. They are round with very short legs. They seem to attach somewhere and not let go.
Pictures of whiteflies on the web generally show hundreds of them and I don’t have that problem. I generally find no more than 4 on a plant and I pull them off with tweezers. I don’t see the adults much, but there are some on the yellow sticky traps. The effect seems big. Look at these two plants:
Just the two in front. These are both Grandaddy Purple autoflower, in the same batch of seeds germinated on the same day. The right one is doing pretty well. The left one went into some kind of distress and flowered way too early. I think it was attacked by these little white monsters. If not them I must have something microscopic attacking some plants.
You definitely have scale and not white flies. White flies take off when you mess with them. They fly right into your face and multiply fast like fungus knats.
The picture at the very top looks just like my nemesis. I don’t get a lot of them, but they seem to prefer plants under 18 inches tall and a few can do a lot of damage to young plants. The plants never seem to fully recover.
I thought the same thing next to the dime. Dead ringer for juvenile stink bugs. But those suckers are fast and do everything they can to evade people (stink bugs). More intelligent to stimulus than the average pest. The real clue is the latter plant pic with the more mature specimen. That’s definitely scale. But the identifier is they are drilled into the stem and hard to remove. Only scale can do that and behaves that way. I think of them as “plant ticks” in my head.